He was the “prince of literature”; his 15,693 lines provided the moral, political, historical, and religious context, the great deeds and the ruling principles, the intellectual atlas and moral compass. The educated man cited him, paraphrased him, alluded to him. It was entirely fair to say that children like Cleopatra were—as a near contemporary had it—“nursed in their learning by Homer, and swaddled in his verses.” Alexander the Great was believed to have slept always with a copy of Homer under his pillow; any cultivated Greek, Cleopatra included, could recite some part of the Iliad and the
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